Dr. Tom Rondeau

Program Manager

Dr. Tom Rondeau joined DARPA as a program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office in May 2016. His research interests include adaptive and reconfigurable radios, improving the development cycle for new signal-processing techniques, and creating general purpose electromagnetic systems.

Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Rondeau was the maintainer and lead developer of the GNU Radio project and a consultant on signal processing and wireless communications. He worked as a visiting researcher with the University of Pennsylvania and as an Adjunct with the IDA Center for Communications Research in Princeton, NJ. In these roles, he helped push forward architectures and algorithms in signal processing for communications, signal analysis, and spectrum monitoring and usage.

Dr. Rondeau is active in many conferences and workshops around the world to help further research and technology in these areas, and he has consulted with many companies and government organizations on new techniques in wireless signal processing. He has published widely in the fields of wireless communications, software radio, and cognitive radio. Dr. Rondeau holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and won the 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award in math, science, and engineering from the Council of Graduate Schools for his work in artificial intelligence in wireless communications.

Programs

Today’s electromagnetic (EM) systems use antenna arrays to provide unique capabilities, such as multiple beam forming and electronic steering, which are important for a wide variety of applications such as communications, signal intelligence (SIGINT), radar, and electronic warfare.

The Adaptive RF Technology (ART) program aims to significantly advance the hardware used in communication radios by developing a fully adaptive and reconfigurable architecture that is agnostic to specified waveforms and standards. ART-enabled “cognitive” radios would be able to reconfigure themselves to operate in any frequency band with any modulation and for multiple access specifications under a range of environmental and operating conditions.

The general-purpose computer has remained the dominant computing architecture for the last 50 years, driven largely by the relentless pace of Moore’s Law. As this trajectory shows signs of slowing, however, it has become increasingly more challenging to achieve performance gains from generalized hardware, setting the stage for a resurgence in specialized architectures. Today’s specialized, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) — hardware customized for a specific application — offer limited flexibility and are costly to design, fabricate, and program.

Modern networks and platforms rely on access to the radio frequency (RF) spectrum for communications, radar sensing, command and control, time transfer, and geo-location. Electromagnetic interference, due to congestion in the spectrum or malicious jamming, can have catastrophic effects. Countering such interference is particularly important for unmanned platforms. To address this challenge, the Hyper-wideband Enabled RF Messaging (HERMES) program seeks to provide an assured link for essential communications by developing a jammer- countering capability that is orders of magnitude beyond the state-of-the-art.

Selected DARPA Achievements

In the early days of DARPA’s work on stealth technology, Have Blue, a prototype of what would become the F-117A, first flew successfully in 1977. The success of the F-117A program marked the beginning of the stealth revolution, which has had enormous benefits for national security.

ARPA research played a central role in launching the Information Revolution. The agency developed and furthered much of the conceptual basis for the ARPANET—prototypical communications network launched nearly half a century ago—and invented the digital protocols that gave birth to the Internet.

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